Dubai Ruler Takes New Step to Clean up Horse Racing

Sheikh Mohammed presents the winner’s trophy for the Dubai World Cup 2013

The ruler of Dubai has taken another step to clean up the sport of horse racing.

On Thursday, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum issued a new law that criminalizes the import, sale and use of anabolic steriods in all horse-related sports in the United Arab Emirates.

It follows his decision last month to temporarily close his Moulton Paddocks stables in the U.K., where 22 horses in the care of his former trainer Mahmood Al Zarooni have tested positive for anabolic steroids, one of the worst doping scandals to hit British horse racing.

“Regrettably, one of my stables in Europe has recently fallen below the standards that I expect and will tolerate,” Sheikh Mohammed said in a statement issued by the Dubai Media Office on Thursday. “I have always believed in the integrity of horse racing and all other horse sports,” the statement added.

The new law criminalizing steroids in the U.A.E. ends one of the inconsistencies in international anti-doping rules that came to light during the scandal.

The British Horseracing Authority found that Mr. Al Zarooni had asked staff to administer the drugs in the U.K. after he had flown with them from Dubai.

Until Sheikh Mohammed’s new decree, it was legal to administer steroids to horses in the U.A.E. as long as the drugs were not present in the horse’s system on race day.

The U.S. and Australia still operate these rules, but the International Federation of Horseracing Authorities, or IFHA, the international body governing horse racing, is now examining whether to recommend a total ban on administering steroids to horses. In the U.K. and France, steroids are banned during both racing and training.

Indeed, Sheikh Mohammed’s move to criminalise steroids appears to have gone a step further, by making the administering or use of steroids in horses a criminal offense.

The BHA banned Mr. Al Zarooni for eight years after 15 horses were found to have been administered steroids. He is appealing against the length of the ban. “Because the horses involved weren’t racing at the time, I did not realize that what I was doing was in breach of the rules of racing,” Mr. Al Zarooni said in a statement issued on his behalf by the stables last month.

On Monday, the BHA said that seven more horses in Mr. Al Zarooni’s care had tested positive for steroids at Moulton Paddocks, after tests were carried out on nearly four hundred horses at the stables. The British body is conducting an investigation to understand the reasons for the doping scandal and how such “serious breaches” of the body’s rules on drugs could be avoided in the future.